Glossa
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The tongue, or lingua, especially of an insect.
"They wished to see what Holy would do with the glossa. “The innocent will tell no lies.” The organ eventually had been divided into nineteen sections, distributed, and ingested. “We swallow your lies and cause them to build our powers.”"
- 2 a mobile mass of muscular tissue covered with mucous membrane and located in the oral cavity wordnet
- 3 Unintelligible ecstatic speech.
"This pattern does not hold in the glossas we have examined: [th] occurs where we expect [], as in the “word” kita in our sample text, and [] occurs freely in other American glossas as an independent sound unit,[…]"
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"They wished to see what Holy would do with the glossa. “The innocent will tell no lies.” The organ eventually had been divided into nineteen sections, distributed, and ingested. “We swallow your lies and cause them to build our powers.”"
Etymology
From the Ancient Greek γλῶσσᾰ (glôssă, “tongue”). Doublet of gloss.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.